Thread by @BrankoMilan

Toynbee in 1967 on why the USA has moved from being in the early 20th C anti-colonialist to becoming conservative and pro-colonialist.

“The reversal of American policies has been dramatic. What, then, is the explanation? The ultimate explanation is, no doubt, the ‘deceitfulness of riches’. Wealth does produce, in its possessors, the unhappy moral effects denounced in the Gospels;

and between the date of the United States’ achievement of independence and the capture of Russia by communism in 1917 the United States had become an incomparably rich country.”

“The American argument is that an [Third World] insurrection that is liberal at the start may turn communist later, so the United States cannot afford to let even a liberal revolution run its course without American intervention against it.”
Toynbee, Looking back 50 years.